Weillcornellmedicine - Weill Medical College - Cornell University

Around the campfire: Nighttime offers the
chance to unwind and debate issues like
the physician’s role in environmentalism.
Camp Dudley is 270 miles from the Upper East Side, but
in some ways it feels like another planet. The fresh air,
the silence, the open space, the greenery, the blue
water of Lake Champlain—it’s light years from the noise
and bustle of Manhattan, not to mention the pressure of
medical school. “In third year, you’re in the hospital all day and then
you go to the library,” says Cynthia Santos ’10. “You don’t leave the little
radius of the hospital. There are studies showing that medical students
are so deprived of sun that they are vitamin D deficient—it gets
that bad.”
Getting time-crunched medical students and professors out of the
city for a week is a fringe benefit of the wilderness medicine elective. In
fact, one of the research projects being conducted by Weill Cornell professors
Jay Lemery, MD, and Flavio Gaudio, MD, is on the protective
effect of outdoor education on mental health, comparing Cornell freshman
surveys to diagnostic codes in a double-blind study. (Their other
projects include studying the use of water filters in an urban setting,
such as a disaster where supplies are compromised, and establishing
guidelines for the use of epinephrine to treat anaphylaxis in the back
country.) “We always say that a huge part of what we’re doing is getting
people out so they can see the link between the outdoors and health
and wellness,” Lemery says. “Historically, doctors take care of themselves
horribly. So that’s a big component of it, acknowledging that
there’s a tremendous amount of stress, from being a medical student
to a resident to an attending.”
Todd Miner, director of Cornell Outdoor Education, cites Richard
Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, which describes a condition called
“nature deficit disorder.” “Kids these days, who average thirty hours a
week of screen time—whether that’s TV, computers, whatever—are not
getting outside and exploring the woods,” he says. “Louv claims that
everything from ADD to the rise in asthma and obesity can be at least
partially traced to the fact that kids spend way too much time indoors.
We would like to serve as an antidote to that and get people outdoors,
Breath of Fresh Air
Wilderness trips feed
more than the mind
connected to the environment—both for their own physical and mental
health and also to provide the next generation of environmental
leaders. Because if people don’t get out there, it’s a lot harder to get
them to understand the role that the environment plays in our planet’s
health.”
On the last night of the wilderness medicine elective, the students
and faculty sat around the campfire and had a philosophical discussion
on the link between the environment and human health. “There has
been a conspicuous absence of physicians chiming in on the environmental
debate,” Lemery says. “My contention is that issues like global
warming, population control, and resource competition affect human
health. We talk about ‘save the Earth,’ and that’s important—but as
physicians, there should be a bigger component, ‘save the humans.’
Why aren’t physicians taking a lead role in environmental advocacy in
the name of human health? In the next fifty years, environmental pressures
are going to put huge stress on the human population. So to be
a good environmental advocate is actually to be a good physician.”
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